Sultan Knish
Every now and then a hobbyist inspired by splashy magazine covers
featuring art deco cities and soaring vehicles full of the cheerful
people of the future puts together a flying car. The result is noted
chiefly for its novelty and then everyone moves along because we aren't a
flying car culture. From the bottom up we might long to soar above the
highways, but from the top down we are a light rail culture, a
biodegradable house culture and a guard rail culture.
For the people at the top the flying car should be able to fit in a
closet, have a minimal carbon footprint, run on the tears of Third World
children and not fly. It should be the sort of thing that you can leave
outside a vegan tofu restaurant in Portland in order to shame working
class truck drivers. That is if you have to have a car at all, rather
than a bike and a light rail pass.
The flying car belonged to an America at a crossroads. A nation
tiptoeing between the adventure of innovation and the progressive order
of the nanny state. Since then the car has drive to this future that we
have now. A world in which we have an expanding poorly managed
government that oversees everything and an innovation culture chiefly
confined to building a complex social environment within a data
infrastructure built on Cold War communications technology. Or as some
still call it, the internet. Flying cars don't have much of a place in a society with emissions
standards, mandatory child seats, heavily taxed gasoline and government
motor companies. They have even less of a place in one that banned the
lawn dart, requires photo ID's to purchase cough syrup and treats
toothpaste as a weapon. America has gone from a nation that idealized
freedom and treated the car as a vehicle of autonomy to one overrun by
central planners still dreaming of the perfect national rail system that
no one will use, because unlike its graceful forebears, but like
everything overseen by the humanitarian bureaucracy it will be designed
to crush the human spirit.
We don't have flying cars for the same reason that we don't any
skyscrapers built in the last few decades worth mentioning or moon
colonies, monuments, frontiers or anything that a latter day
civilization could dig up and admire. There are skyscrapers still going
up in American cities, if you haven't heard of them that's because
they're self-effacing LEED compliant glass angular shapes that you
forget even while you're looking at them. Even their ugliness is not
stark enough to commit them to memory.
And of course they aren't very tall. Tallness like flying cars and the
ambition to do anything but put out press releases is unsustainable.
They do have a sense of the future to them, but an undramatic one, a
future in which everything has been done and everyone sits around in
glass boxes, pondering the state of their ennui and admiring the
architect for putting an unnecessary asymmetrical triangle at the top of
the glass box to remind us that the world dies every time we buy
non-locally grown produce.
There is still an ambition to make large things. If the Chrysler and
Empire State buildings don't make it to the next era, the stone age
dwellers of the future can still marvel over the edifices of our
countless government offices, temples of stone and steel filling the
land, rope lines through which men trudged, in the opinion of future
archeologists to participate in arcane rites or perhaps lining up to be
human sacrifices. And they won't be entirely wrong.
We still build things, like affordable housing, government offices and
memorials to multicultural heroes, we just don't build anything that
matters or that lasts. There is no room in the massive fragmented tower
of babel for anything but personal ambition and collective ideology.
Nothing is made for the ages, we're lucky if most of what we make lasts
till tomorrow.
The vision of bigness that we have is confined to mapping and running a
large society. There is no room for individualism within that vision, no
towers built to mean something, no vehicles of personal autonomy. It is
all about integrating, the endless search for a solution to the puzzle
of making all the individual pieces work as perfect cogs in the machine.
And that's done by smoothing out the rough human edges so that they all
fit together.
There are few personal statements anymore, only approved expressions of
social values, even if they come in a grotesque incomprehensible form.
Beauty is out, social criticism is in. Making people feel bad with an
expression of personal ambition is selfish, making them feel bad with
social criticism is good. And since the only people who get it feel good
about it, it's all for the greater good of selfishly root out
selfishness in others.
We have become a culture run by committees and if nothing ever really
gets done, if trillions of dollars are spent and vanish without a trace,
that is only to be expected. The innovation that we still have is
personal, individual. Apple failed as a company until it brought back
the eccentric monomaniacal vision of Steve Jobs, whose neurotic impulses
turned it into the biggest company in the world. Its mobile success was
driven by the individualistic tinkering of app developers, much like
the internet's explosion was made possibly not by Al Gore, but by
individual obsessive innovations.
Those obsessions can create a programming language like Ruby or a flying
car, but it's much harder to get a society to adopt the latter than the
former. Innovation succeeds by outpacing committees who blink in
bafflement at it or run to catch up. Had the committees understood what
the internet would become, they would have killed it back when that was
still possible. But flying cars are easy to kill. In the society that
the committees have created, the flying car is a non-starter. The
conference attendees sitting around tables aren't plotting to kill the
flying car, they're plotting to kill the car.
Flying cars are dangerous. Imagine the accidents, imagine the lawsuits.
An elite which panics at a child's drawing of a gun or a new Army
recruit illegally drinking a beer is in no shape to cope with a crazy
world of flying cars. At least not without a prolonged debate on whether
the flying car is a phallic or yonic symbol and how it will impact
minority representation in congress, not to mention the obesity
epidemic, the self-esteem of gay teenagers and the plight of Guatemalan
farmers.
A flying car disrupts the larger scheme of things which requires us to
make do with less, to take the carpool lane, not to take to the sky. It
distracts us from constantly repeating to ourselves that we are the
problem, that the automobile is a pestilent plague and that we are
destroying the planet by not listening to our jet setting better's green
tips.
Is there any place for a flying car in a low flow toilet culture? Yes
there is, as a reminder of what we can't have so long as the latter
isn't being flushed along with the entire corrupt lunatic establishment
and its single-minded grip on power.
We can't have flying cars and constant media panics. We can't have
flying cars and a man in the White House who is determined to reengineer
our society by raising the price of energy. We can't have flying cars
and regulations on everything. We can't have flying cars and Lawsuits R'
Us. We can't have flying cars and the idea that every time we take a
breath we are destroying the planet.
There's a basic choice to be made of the kind of society we want. The
FDR to Ike to JFK road we have traveled has foreclosed a great many of
those options. They turned the fantastic visions of the future into a
limited one where we can innovate so long as we do it on our computer
and before the legislative window finally closes on the internet.
The science fiction vision that dominates our culture isn't that of the
flying car or the spaceship, it's of the apocalypse, a secular
armageddon created by our own irresponsible use of technology. The
Warmists are nothing more than villagers with PhD's still chasing
Frankenstein, except that we are now all Frankie, living in a world
where it takes a village to raise a transgender multiracial child and
torch the reactionary monsters who still haven't had their criminal
brains swapped out for progressive craniums with lower sustainable
capacity and an automatic dimmer switch for Earth Day.
A country of flying cars is as terrifying to such people as a plague of
zombies or the end of the mainstream media. It's outside the box that is
being built around us with every law, every new behavior manual and
government mandate. Flying is too much like escaping, taking to the air,
out of reach of EPA SWAT teams, hectoring anchormen, bickering
congressmen and the entire last days of Rome anthill underfoot.
Escape is a dangerous thing. Even the prospect of it gives people hope
that there is a future outside the box. And so we may briefly be allowed
to look at a flying car, before we head out with our 3-1-1 toothpaste
to the TSA, our health insurance bought, our earphones turned to NPR
where there is a discussion on how Republican budget cuts are
undermining the traditional Native American art of woodcarving. So long
as we don't get any ideas about flying away.
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